Monday, 7 February 2011

This post, which is a heavily cut version of the paper I read at HUSSE 10 Conference in Hungary is about a possible link between the parerga in Thomas More’s Utopia and scholarly blogging nowadays, i.e. between these otherwise incommensurable phenomena. A possible link between the two is the then and now new technology of publication, more precisely the shift from manuscript culture to print culture then and from print culture to digital culture nowadays. To establish the link between the two I will utilise in a somewhat rough mode Gérard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation.

The concept of the paratext includes everything that can be found around the text of a work, from the title of the work to the book ending colophon. Out of this wide range of textual and visual elements, I am going to focus on 16 items in Thomas More’s Utopia that include epistles and poems written by various people, woodcuts, and an alphabet. These are the items that have been referred to with the label “parerga” by More scholars since 1931. These elements appeared in the first four authoritative editions of the Utopia.

Genette’s method of defining paratextual elements comes very much in handy for the sake of linking the Morean parerga and blogging. Genette when meditating about paratexts, explores the “paratextual message’s spatial, temporal, substantial, pragmatic, and functional characteristics.” The reason for following this template of analysis is that with this lucid method of identification I can succinctly explore instable character of the parerga, and also the problematics around their communicative situation and indirect functions.

The temporal and spatial instability can be demonstrated by the chart below:

1516, Louvain

1517, Paris

1518 March, Basel

1518 November, Basel

A woodcut of Utopia

The Utopian alphabet

The Tetrastichon

Hexastichon Anemolii

Giles letter to Busleyden

Desmarais’ letter and poem

Geldenhauer’s poem

Schrijver’s poem

Busleyden’s letter to More

More’s letter to Giles

only in the 1516

only in 1517

only in 1518

both in 1516, 17

both in 1516, 18

both in 1517, 18

in every edition

Hexastichon Anemolii

Budé’s letter

Giles’ letter to Busleyden

Desmarais’ letter and poem

More’s letter to Giles

After Utopia

6.More’s second letter to Giles

7.Busleyden’s letter to More

8.Geldenhauer’s poem

9.Schrijver’s poem

10.Errata

11.Gourmont’s device

Erasmus’s letter to Folben

Budé’s letter

Hexastichon Anemolii

woodcut of Utopia (Ambrosius Holbein)

A Utopian alphabet

The Tetrastichon

Giles’ letter to Busleyden

More’s letter to Giles

Woodcut of the interlocutors

After Utopia

9.Busleyden’s letter to More

10.Geldenhauer’s poem

11.Schrijver’s poem

identical with 1518 March, Basel

Three observations follow from the chart.

The columns demonstrate that the first three authoritative editions contained somewhat different elements.

The colours demonstrate that the some items appeared in one of the three, two of the three or in all of the authoritative editions.

There is instability insofar as the location of the material is concerned, as from the 1517 edition there appear items in the postludial position adjacent to the preludial one.

So, all the editions from the 1516 to the 1518 March (November) editions were published with some editorial and authorial consent and yet there are substantial changes from one edition to the other revealing editorial and authorial decisions and indecisions, visions and revisions.

Along with the temporal and spatial instability of the parerga, one also has to account for the pragmatic aspect, i.e. the features that follow from the communicative situation focusing only on the sender(s) and the addressee(s).

As far as the “senders” of the prefatory material are concerned again there is a great variety of possibilities if sticking to the Genetteian classification. In the chart below I have placed some of the senders to identify them.

Authorial

Allographic

Actorial (character from the text)

Authentic

More’s letters (?)

Budé’s letter,

Gilles’ letter (?)

More’s letters

Apocryphal (real person’s name, but was written by someone else)

-

-

-

Fictive

Author of the alphabet, poem in Utopian

More’s, Gilles’ letters (?)

Some of the senders can easily be identified, some, however, can be placed in several slots. Some of the senders are clearly authentic allographic senders, i.e. real people, but other than the author, e.g. Budé in his letter. It is also clear that the author of the Utopian alphabet is a fictive allographic one. Thomas More’s letter to Giles, and Giles to More, however, stick out from this chart. Thomas More’s letters at face value should be authentic authorial, as he is a real person, author of both the text and the letters. Also Giles’s letter should be authentic allographic insomuch as he is real, author of the letter but not identical with the author of the text. At the same time, however, both of them may as well be classified as fictive actorial senders insofar as both of them mention meeting Raphael, which in turn identifies them with characters in the text. This is not the whole story though, as More’s letters may well appear within the authentic actorial category insomuch as the narrative of the text is first person singular.

Parallel to the elusiveness and complexity of the sender(s) of the parerga, the addressees of them also display a dichotomy, especially with respect to the epistles. This dichotomy lies in the interplay between the addressee named in the title of the epistle on the one hand, and the addressee who is the reader of the printed text. These epistles swarm with expressions of inwardness, which is the more interesting if we consider that these letters were not only addressed to the people named as the addressees, but to a general reading public with the intention to read Utopia. So what is going on is putting on display, sharing with a faceless, unknown reading public their real or feigned private affairs, mistakes and friendships. That is we may assume that there is a cunning game being played with the facelessness of the unforeseeable addressee and the addressee of the letter, or more precisely a game with the new technology of printing and the then traditional way of manuscript culture.

The fourth Genettian category, i.e. the function of paratextual elements also reveals much about the parerga. The parerga on the one hand compensates for the loss of context with the appearance of print culture, which was there for the readers of manuscripts. It also functions as a teambuilding exercise for these leading humanists, men of letters and of public affairs. Also the paperga functioned as a marketing device revealing the understanding of the needs of the book as a commodity, and how much it mattered who published the work, and who gave their names to the publication.

After having seen the temporal, spatial and communicative instability of the parerga and their functions, we should move from the humanist scholarly friendship to Digital Humanities, or at least to one of its activities to show how the new technology influences scholarly activity in the 21st century. More precisely I would like to call attention to the technology that is called blogging as something which in a variety of ways resembles the Morean parerga.

Scholarly blogging may be seen as paratext to the published material. It surrounds the publication of a scholarly text insomuch as it may inform the reader about the state of research, about parts, small parts of an ongoing research, ideas that are cast on the margins of the focus of the research, shortened versions of texts published or to be published, about ideas that are interesting but too small to be included in a large project, or snippets, books, ideas that one comes across when in the middle of research.

These blogs can be characterized with instability, flexibility. Blogs similarly to the parerga can be revised after their first publication, can be deleted, can be removed from one blogging platform to the other. The same text may be published at several blogging services with the same type or with another one, i.e. can be published both with traditional macro-blogging (www.blogpost.com) and with meso-blogging services (www.tumblr.com), or at different macro-blogging services, e.g. at www.blogpost.com and at www.wordpress.com.

The communicative situation is also similar to that of the parerga. The sender of the blog can be a real person identified with a name. Some bloggers, however, use nicknames, or rather pennames, and the real person remains hidden, or known to a narrow circle of readers. The addressee, of blogging poses a similar situation to that of early printing. In this case there is the same unknown, unforeseeable audience that was at stake for the authors of the printed medium, i.e. almost anybody may bump into the blog post. Nevertheless, the intended reader is a specialist and the interested reader, and both should find relevant issues for themselves.

Blogging also creates and celebrates communities. On the one hand bloggers inform the intended readers about what they are doing as researchers. They share parts of research projects, thoughts that remain on the margins of these projects, which are worth meditating about. On the other hand, as this technology creates an environment for reflections as comments, there is room for building communities. In this way a blog post is not a finished item in the long run, but may gradually grow with comments, comments on comments and replies to comments. In this respect a post functions as a discussion forum for specialists and for the interested.

Blogging also functions as a means of marketing. Academic bloggers advertise their own published works and blog posts or those of others. Once, say, a blog post is out, or a book, or journal article, a reference to it may soon appear on a micro-blogging platform (www.twitter.com), as well to inform people about it. This reference, i.e. tweet can later be re-tweeted again and again, which fosters instant publicity in so far unimaginable ways.

As a conclusion, one may claim that the comparison of the print in the early 16th century and web 2.0 on an abstract level is fruitful. Back in the 16th-century humanists utilised printing for their own purposes insomuch as creating, sustaining and even boasting off with their scholarly and friendly community. Furthermore they played with its format of its being public with some inwardness. They also discovered the advantages of its power of and for publicity. Similarly to this, blogging is perfect for creating, sustaining and creating social and research networks, and thus contexts for scholarly writing and research. And also the game with publicity and inwardness is there to be played with. Third, blogging is an unexpectedly and unpredictably powerful tool of instant publicity. It is, however, not enough to see the potential in blogging, as the very nature of web 2.0 is that it is in constant evolution. So it is the scholars’ responsibility to take part in its evolution and thus to fashion it into a valuable tool, similarly to their renaissance colleagues, fulfilling the promise anchored in Historia est magistra vitae philosophi.

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

Juliet’s speech about what there is in a name is a fine piece of language philosophy. I have always known this, but during the HUSSE 10 Conference (Hungary) Géza Kállay’s paper on language philosophy in Romeo and Juliet triggered thoughts in me around universal and particular references and gaining maturity as they appear in the next quote:

Tis but thy name that is my enemy;

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. (2.2.38-42)

There is an intricate interplay between the processes leading from the individual to the universal and backwards in Juliet’s use of naming. She starts out with the individual (Romeo “thy,” “thou”), then takes a step towards the more general, i.e. to the family. Then she ascends to a more universal level, i.e. to body parts that can belong to any human being. As a last step instead of specifying body parts, she makes the most universal claim: neither the individual, nor the body part is specified, but she lets the audience decide for themselves.

Juliet at the same time counterbalances this movement towards the universal with another movement leading back to the individual. The last, most universal reference (“any other part”) may function as a rather particular allusion, depending on how the actress acts out what she is saying. Claire Danes in Baz Luhrman’s Romeo+Juliet utters this line like a “coy mistress”: turns her eyes downwards and smiles. With this act she indicates that she is not alluding to “any” body part, but to a particular one, to the one that a woman in love is interested in very much. Romeo in his masculinity and attractiveness, in his unmistakable individuality, thus, returns for a moment.

In this speech, Juliet, through her dividing the name from the thing (see Erasmus’s “Of Names and Things” in his Colloquia), revealing interest in the problematics of the universal and the particular, grows up in the eyes of the audience. The young lady who knew nothing about marriage when talking to her mother, now displays maturity. She displays intellectual maturity by playing shrewdly the card of a language philosopher, and personal maturity by revealing herself as an emotionally and physically mature young woman in love. All my thanks go to Géza for his paper!